Understanding REST conceptually with Rails

Question

I'm a little late to the party, but I'm trying to wrap my brain around how REST is supposed to work, both in general and in Ruby on Rails. I've read a bunch of articles online about this already, but still don't feel like I'm getting the big picture.

REST as I understand it, is a series of aspirational statements, with the net result at the bottom being that URLs should contain all the information necessary to handle a request, and gets should not be able to change the state on the server, and a bunch of other concrete guidelines.

As I understand it, REST in Rails is based around CRUD, which is to say, every model has a create, read, update and a delete action. Each of these actions is accessed through a similar set of URLs, generated by mapping a resource in the routes. So a login URL is creating a user session, so the URL would look like example.com/session/new with a POST, and logout would be example.com/session/destroy with a POST.

What exactly is the benefit of standardizing URLs in this fashion? It strikes me as optimizing for machine readability at the expense of human readability. I know that you could then remap in the routes file example.com/login to example.com/session/new but that is just one more step for no apparent gain to me.

Is it considered really bad practice to develop a website that uses traditional routes now?

Furthermore, each of these CRUD actions should be able to respond to requests with whatever type of response the request is looking for. So the same link to, say, example.com/tasks could also be called at example.com/tasks.xml to get an xml representation of the result, or example.com/tasks.json for a json representation.

Is this to say that a RESTful API would just be the usual links on the site but with xml appended? It strikes me as very strange and awkward that a web API would behave in this way, but this seems to be what's implied by everything I've read. I'm more used to seeing an API that has links like example.com/api/tasks to get the list of tasks. What exactly is the advantage of this approach?

Answer 1

Rest provides another chunk of "convention over configuration." For a widely used, limited set of common problems (crud actions against the models as a whole), rest is very useful as an application development convention.

What exactly is the benefit of standardizing URLs in this fashion?

Programmer efficiency. Less to think about; enables more time to be spent on harder problems, etc. Better maintainability. Easier testing. Etc.

Is it considered really bad practice to develop a website that uses traditional routes now?

Yes, for crud actions that are interacting with an entire record of the model.

Furthermore, each of these CRUD actions should be able to respond to requests with whatever type of response the request is looking for. So the same link to, say, example.com/tasks could also be called at example.com/tasks.xml to get an xml representation of the result, or example.com/tasks.json for a json representation.

Is this to say that a RESTful API would just be the usual links on the site but with xml appended?

Yes, if your api fits the rest model. I think the big issue is authentication. If you want your api to be stateless, then you'll probably need to include authentication with each call. At that point, if you don't want to use HTTP level authentication, you'd need to decide how to include the credentials.